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James: Fight for more transit or face failure

GTA residents are unlikely to get the reference made in a Tuesday speech by the former chief planner in Toronto — and that proves Paul Bedford’s point.

A population the size of Greater Montreal is headed for the GTA over 25 years and transportation planners don’t have a way of moving them around a Toronto region already saddled with the worst commute times in North America.

Few can recall Metrolinx’s bold plan called The Big Move, unveiled in 2008. But the blueprint costs as much as $80 billion and a deficit-laden provincial government has funded only one-tenth of that.

Unless residents in the Toronto region start talking about this now, we won’t be ready to deal with the controversy when Metrolinx files its funding strategy to the province in 13 months.

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The options will include road tolls, parking fees, sales tax and other measures politicians are afraid of broaching. Property taxes can’t cover it. Business and governments alone can’t fund it.

“We can’t wait. We have to start the conversation now. We have to create a sense of urgency,” Paul Bedford urged members of the land and development industry, the very people who sell citizens on the virtues of GTA living.

“The Big Move will become a big joke and I’m serious about this,” Bedford told the industry leaders at their conference in Toronto Tuesday. “There’s an unprecedented transit deficit resulting from the past 25 years of inaction. (Metrolinx) has been talking (quietly) for four plus years. We must create a sense of urgency.”

Urgency and desperation. Growth and development gallop ahead, mobility needs increase, delays in transit improvements multiply and solutions stall on the pages of reports and visionary documents.

Meanwhile, TTC ridership is at record levels, approaching 500 million a year; GO Transit is at record pace, hitting 50 million passengers a year.

Gridlock is a daily reality, with commuting times now 81 minutes a day. And more people are coming — 100,000 a year into one of the hottest real estate markets in North America, leading the world in condo construction.

While Metrolinx approved four new LRT lines in Toronto last month, set for completion by 2020, these projects cost just over $8 billion — one-tenth the need identified in The Big Move. Unfunded projects include:

Note that the above does not include the idea, gaining currency, that we should build more costly subways all over the region. Adopt that and $80 billion becomes $120 billion. .

“Essentially, to embark on a strategy to move The Big Move” the region will need “$3 billion to $4 billion of new revenue per year for the next 25 years,” Bedford said.

Other city regions — Atlanta, Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles are using the very funding tools Toronto will have to embrace, if the projects are to go ahead.

And only a coalition of business, labour, environmental, community and political leaders can create the platform and political climate to deliver such an essential strategy, he said.

Leave it to the politicians and they will recoil in fear. But if civic leaders get out in front — and now — the projects may have a fighting chance. Besides, the quest has to supersede political parties, partisan politics, inter-regional competition and petty jealousies. To be successful, it will have to be the fight of our lives for those of us who live here.

Start now, and we’ve got a fighting chance. Delay and it gets near impossible. Fail, and the Toronto region’s economy is doomed.

Next: Framing the campaign that must follow

Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca

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